“This is something I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency. The problem is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed.”

-Barack Hussein Obama

“The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.”

-Voltaire

“If we resort to lawlessness, the only thing we can hope for is civil war, untold bloodshed, and the end of our dreams.”

-Archie Lee Moore

Barack Obama has long uttered self-congratulatory rhetoric about his administration being “Historic” and “Unprecedented”, which for the most part is true, but not for the reasons he likes to feel good about while taking one of his historic and unprecedented number of lavish vacations on our dime. Never has an administration ever been more contemptuous of the law as this one.

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires of the President that ” he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,”, and yet this self-styled “Constitutional Scholar” has failed to exercise a basic and fundamental duty of the President as assigned by law.

On or after the first Monday in January but not later than the first Monday in February of each year, the President shall submit a budget of the United States Government for the following fiscal year. Each budget shall include a budget message and summary and supporting information. The President shall include in each budget the following:

The law has required the President to submit a budget since The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which might raise the possibility that this law is somehow racist, but seeing as how we did not have a black President until the election of William Jefferson Clinton in 1992, I think we can safely discount this possibility, and Obama’s many apologists will have to find a different excuse for his failure to perform this legal requirement of office all but one year of his tenure.

I find his failure to do so somewhat puzzling, as he lamented how the Constitution operates as “a charter of negative liberties” that constrains the federal government, rather than empowers it. (How the fact that this is a feature and not a bug has managed to evade such a distinguished Constitutional scholar surely is a mystery for the ages, along with how he has so far managed to not recognize that the Declaration of Independence was the charter, and that the Constitution was the bylaws. Maybe he was too busy with his duties leading the Harvard Law Review to pay attention that semester.) Surely for someone who bristles as much as he appears to at the idea of what he is not permitted to do, the thought of being able to propose and submit a budget would be a remarkable opportunity. Alas, this is obviously not the case. Apparently budgets are for little presidents…the ones who don’t promise “fundamental change”.

However, this is not an end to President Obama’s casual disregard for the law (or at least the ones he doesn’t like). His administration’s role in the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies lead to events which flipped the bird to long-standing bankruptcy law, and destroyed longstanding principles underlying secured transactions and principles of commercial credit.

But this was not the end of The President’s disrespect of the law. He also took it upon himself to disregard the notion of separation of powers and determine for himself when the Senate was in recess, so he could appoint, without their certain rejection, appointees that would not be consented to by the Senate.

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states:

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

This specifically does not give the President the right to determine when the Senate is in recess, as each house, and each house alone, is responsible for determining the rules of its proceedings, as set forth in Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution.

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.

Yet the President felt compelled to take it upon himself to determine that the Senate was in recess, despite the Senate assertions otherwise, so as to effect appointments of officials without the Senate’s advice and consent. First in the case of Richard Cordray, to lead his new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and then Sharon Block and Richard Griffin to the National Labor Relations Board. While Obama apologists propose that it was the Senate violating the Constitution by conducting pro-forma sessions, that appeared to have no other purpose other than blocking the President’s ability to make recess appointments, the fact remains that the Constitution unequivocally gives the Senate the authority to make its own rules.

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two-thirds, expel a Member.

This means that the President did not have any lawful remedy to his complaint other than a resort to the Courts, for a ruling on whether or not the Senate’s actions comported with the Constitution. (And it is quite likely that the courts would have deferred to the Senate’s judgement by finding the action to be in the nature of a “political question”, which until Bush v. Gore, the courts have long decided by not making any decision whatsoever.) Once again, the President is the one who acted in an unlawful manner…a concept clearly not driven home to the administration, based on this ludicrous assertion by Administration Spokesclown Jay Carney:

Carney attends Teh Peepuls Skool of Law N Stuf, which makes him uniquely qualified to state this rather remarkable assertion. At least I hope so, because his Wiki bio states that he has a B.A. in Russian and Eastern European Studies from Yale University. I find it interesting that his boss is not as certain, as he has quietly resubmitted two of the not-recess appointed official’s names for confirmation by the Senate.

Sadly, this is not the full extent of this administration’s lawlessness, which will be demonstrated in Part II.

2 Responses

Thanks for that Zwyicki article( I read it a while back and lost the link when my computer died). That is a definitive look at what may have been one of the largest government sanctioned swindles outside of the current Ponzi schemes of Social Security, Medicare and the ever so popular ACA(Obamacare).

What happened in the auto maker case was more akin to what we could call the board room equivalent of a smash and grab than a legal bankruptcy proceeding. The items were stolen and redistributed to the intended primary beneficiaries- the politically connected at the UAW.

Depending on who you believe the break even price is $53-$70 a share so I don’t have to tell you that the $27.50 they are going to unload it for is a real as opposed to just a hypothetical loss. This in a struggling company that has again been falling into the habits that put them in dire straits and that benefits from a twisting of the IRC loss rules that preserved benefits for them that our “subsidized” oil companies can only dream of.

Lawlessness and cronyism- Perfect together!(if you are from NJ that should familiar ring to it)

"I want these “…and I’m a communist” dumbshits to have a Coming to Jesus moment that they will NEVER forget. I want them staring in to the eyes of every American who knows that government has very specifically designated roles, and are fed-up to their eyeballs with the overeaching, paternalistic, oppressive monster that the Left (with help from the establishment Right) set loose on us. I want those greedy, lazy, control-freaky bastards quaking with fear when they are met with an electorate determined to wrest their liberties, including the right to fail, back from a government that would enslave us all to the service of a soul-killing mediocrity. I want their asses so horrifiyingly and memorably whipped that the mere memory will cow a century’s worth of socialist/communist/marxist acoyltes into an ashamed silence."
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"When a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we no longer have a Constitution, we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is according to their own views of what it ought to mean."--Justice Curtis, Dissent, Dred Scott v. Sanford

"The very idea of power, and the right of the people to establish government, presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government. All obstructions to the execution of its laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberations and actions of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency."- George Washington

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
-Plato

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
-Plato